CHAPTER XVI.

Christ's Anticipations of last Passion previous to Night of Gethsemane-Luke, xii., 49-51: "I have a baptism to be baptized with— John, xii., 27, 28: "Now is my soul troubled”—John, xiii., 21: "He was troubled in spirit"-Hebrews, v., 7, 8: "When he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears" -Objection answered arising from Divine Prescience-Progress of Christ's Anticipations.

PREVIOUS to the night of Gethsemane, the apprehension of his approaching suffering had, more than once, visibly affected the incarnate God. The first passage illustrating this truth is the following: "I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled ?”—Luke, xii., 49. "But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!"-- Luke, xii., 50. "Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on the earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division."-Luke, xii., 51. The whole passage has been transcribed, with a view the better to exhibit, in all its potency, the full meaning of the fiftieth verse. The speaker was Christ. The dreaded baptism was his last passion. Who was "straitened" until the baptism should be accomplished? Was it the man only? or was the indwelling God also "straitened?” Did the distressing apprehension pervade the

whole self of the divine speaker? or did it touch only his manhood, that finite speck, which bore a less proportion to the majestic whole than the glow-worm bears to the sun in the firmament?

In the forty-ninth and fifty-first verses his Godhead was clearly the paramount theme of the divine speaker. He adverted to his having "come" into the world; manifestly referring to his advent as the second person of the Trinity. He announced one of the effects of his having "come" into the world. His advent was to "send fire" and engender "division" on the earth. The foretold "shaking of the nations" was to be effected, not by the meek and pacific son of Mary, but by the almighty power of the indwelling God. The piercing "division" created by the Gospel pervaded and severed the sinews, and arteries, and very heart of the social world. A fire was kindled on the day of Pentecost, whose mighty conflagration scarcely ceased to rage until the faith of the fishermen had fixed its sandalled foot on the throne of the Cæsars. This triumph of the religion of the cross over the marshalled powers of unbelieving man, armed with the terrors of persecution, headed by the prince of darkness, and re-enforced by all his legions, was, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle ever displayed by him who came "to send fire on the earth."

If, then, in the forty-ninth and fifty-first verses of this memorable passage, the Godhead of the divine speaker was thus the almost exclusive theme, is it indeed true that, in the intervening, or fiftieth verse, it became, as it were, utterly merged in the little atom of his manhood! Did the Godhead suddenly pass, in the continuous discourse, under a total eclipse at the end of the forty-ninth verse, which eclipse as suddenly disappeared at the beginning of the fifty-first? Or, to drop the figures, did the incarnate God, at the commencement of the fiftieth verse, abruptly descend from his divinity to his mere manhood, and as abruptly reascend, at the end of that verse, from his mere manhood back to his divinity?

Such a double transition, so instantaneously repeated, would have seemed almost a phenomenon, had we been forced to yield our credence to its existence, by intrinsic indications that such was the intention of the speaker; but there are no such indications on the face or in the relations of the passage. The divine speaker passed through these contiguous and kindred verses, himself designated in each by the same personal pronoun “ I," without the slightest intimation of any change in the natures of which he spoke. The subject represented by that personal pronoun formed, in each of the three verses, the one undivided and indi

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visible theme. If his Godhead was the chief agent in sending "fire" and engendering "division” on the earth, his Godhead was to be the chief recipient of the dreaded "baptism."

To impute to the speaking God a double change of subject, radical and vast as the change from the infinite to the finite, and thence back again from the finite to the infinite, affecting, too, his own united being, within the compass of this brief passage, without a shadow of change in the language which his wisdom chose, would seem, indeed, like the mere dream of fancy; or, if we are obliged to view it as a daylight and waking theory, we cannot but regard it as one of the boldest efforts of that bold hypothesis, "God is impassible." Such a dream, or such a theory, if so we must call it, should find no registered place among the fundamental articles of Christian faith.

If, then, we may justly infer from the language of Christ, in the fiftieth verse of the passage under review, compared with his language in the german verses, which go before and after it, that he intended to comprehend in that verse, as well as in the other two, both of his united natures, we have the conclusive authority of the Son of God, that his divinity as well as his manhood was

"straitened" by the dread of the coming "baptism."

The

The next passage showing that the dismay of the incarnate God, caused by his approaching sufferings, had anticipated the scene of the garden, is the following: "Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say y? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour." -John, xii., 27. What soul was troubled? prevalent theory would say that it was the mere human soul of the divine victim. So said not the divine victim himself. His declaration, in its plain and obvious import, comprehended his whole united spirituality. The limiting adjective "human" fell not from the lips of the incarnate God. It is the interpolation of earth.

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Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour." The august Comer was the second person of the Trinity. Upon his advent he had received the "body" prepared for him, and thus "manifest in the flesh" had meekly awaited that hour of hours. But upon the

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near approach of that tremendous hour, new and strange" in the annals of eternity, when God the Father was to pour on God the Son, made sin for sinners, the storm of infinite wrath, compounded of the "multitudinous" transgressions of all the re